I have users, but development is painfully slow. I'm facing a lot of problems and my funding has almost run out. Anyway I can turn this situation around?
Some more information about your situation would help.
What is your product?
What problem does it solve for buyers?
Do they acknowledge that problem exists, and value fixing it?
Are they willing to trade money for your solution?
Do you have a "ladder" for people to buy increasingly valuable things from you, or are you trying to rely entirely on revenue from this one thing?
Do you have Traffic and Conversion tools in place?
You are asking us to diagnose a situation, but just like your doctor not being able to diagnose what's wrong if they can't see you or hear fully what's going on, it's pretty tough to blind.
Only two components or issues exist when it comes to Sales: Traffic, and Conversion.
I don't care how great your Conversion tool is, or how great you believe it is--if you don't have a high quality Traffic source hooked up to it, the Conversion tool is basically useless.
So where are you getting leads (potential buyers) from? Are they pre-qualified for your offer (do they have a want or need, at least, for what you can give them)? And in what quantity are you receiving them into your funnel?
Each business needs four systems:
1. Lead Generation
2. Qualification
3. Closing
4. Fulfillment.
How well are you doing on all four of these?
It's very common for a tech guy to rush out and drop money on the development of some brainwave they had. Unfortunately, you cannot ignore "business" in the hectic race to bring a product to life. If you've created something nobody wants, or nobody understands, you've wasted your resources.
I recommend these Sales Tactics videos I've made about SaaS; there are links to written blog posts in the video descriptions if you would rather read than watch and listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MGF-C0GPQY
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZQ_8Srt7g
Hi, I'm Craig Morrison, I'm a Product Designer and Entrepreneur.
The biggest red flag I see here is that "development" is painfully slow.
What are you trying to develop? More features? Bigger product? More more more more more?
Stop. Stop development entirely. No more building. You have a product. That product has users.
Feature bloat will kill you. Every "addition" you put on your product costs more time and money to maintain (and fix).
Keep that in mind. The more you build, the more you're adding to your monthly burn. If you don't have much money, you need to halt everything and focus 100% on the goal of generating revenue.
You need more paying users.
Focus on two things:
1. Communicating with current users to find out their pain points in their lives and with your product.
2. Use the info you discover about your current users to find more users.
With the proper user research, you should be able to establish patterns in your users that will teach you how to speak to their pain points when pitching your product.
It should also give you an indication where these users hang out, either online or in real life.
The next step is to target these ares using the knowledge you gained from speaking to users.
If you have a free product which you're hoping to generate ad revenue or get funding/bought than you might want to consider if there is a way provide a paid version of what you've built.
I obviously don't know what kind of company you're talking about, but I would highly suggest you do a Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter can be the solution to your problems - and you will need to hire an agency that has dealt with Kickstarter in the past and knows how to help you. That agency is my agency, Bloominari. By setting up a Kickstarter, we can get you funds and simultaneously add people to your email list. Please feel free to reach out to me about this and I can give you a free project estimate.
